


Mile End

by PacificRimbaud



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Allusions to Violence, Alternate Universe - 1930s, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Police, Angst, Catholicism, Cigarettes, Crime, Drama, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Light Angst, London, Reconciliation, Reconciliation Sex, Roman Catholicism, Romance, Smoking, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 03:49:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28718361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: In London, 1930, Detective Constable Percy Weasley finds himself too close for comfort to his investigation's unavoidable conclusions.
Relationships: Pansy Parkinson/Percy Weasley
Comments: 66
Kudos: 160





	Mile End

**Author's Note:**

> Endless thanks to my unbelievably patient beta, [icepower55](https://archiveofourown.org/users/icepower55/pseuds/icepower55). Her writing is _extraordinary_. Please go check out her work if you haven't already.
> 
> This work contains sustained depictions of era-appropriate smoking.
> 
> London Underground stations are accurate for the time period.

**_London, 1930_ **

The raps always arrived in threes on the half lite door—one long, two short—as though the secretary felt the need to announce herself in code.

Percy glanced up from his writing, but before he could answer, the one-eyed man sitting opposite did.

"Come in, Miss Brown.”

Alastor Moody blared the invitation without breaking his focus on the paper in front of him. Only his mouth moved: first with the lyrical growl of his speech, then to drag at the end of the cigarette vised between his lips.

Three years earlier, at twenty-two years old, Percy had arrived at the station, framed forensics degree in hand, and found his and Moody’s desks facing opposite walls. For reasons Moody felt disobliged to clarify, either he, the prior occupant of Percy’s desk, or both had preferred them that way.

Though neither Percy nor Moody would admit to having moved them, eight months into their partnership their desks were flush in the center of the room. The tacit agreement was that the arrangement better facilitated signing joint reports, sharing photographic evidence, and leaning back in their splintering wooden chairs to deliberate case theories.

It also made it easier for Moody to heckle Percy about the stiffness of his shirt collars and the discomforting Brilliantine tidiness of his hair, and for Percy to dispense a dose of nonverbal disapproval each time Moody pulled his flask from his lower right hand drawer.

A fan, dull silver metal and oiled to a hum, stood atop Percy’s desk, blowing stale air at Moody's face and riffling through the wilderness of documents flourishing across his desk.

Moody dragged on his tarry Woodbine with one side of his mouth, then breathed out the smoke with the other. A flake of ash blew back, landing below the patch strapped over his left eye. He brushed it away with his thumb, smearing a grey streak from the crest of his cheek to his nose, then resumed scratching at his arrest report form.

Shoulders squared and spine perpendicular as a flag pole, Percy moved the nib of his pen in controlled and fluid strokes over his own paper, producing paragraphs as typographically disciplined as Moody’s were deranged.

As the door swung open, he replaced the cap over the nib and stood his pen in its holder. He blew a puff of breath over the drying page, set it on the appropriate pile and secured it with a glass paperweight.

Lavender Brown—in a lavender dress, round-edged and luminous blonde—peered around the door.

“You’ve someone here to see you, Detective Constable,” she said. “He says he’s expected.”

Percy pulled a rolled cloth from his desk drawer and unfolded it across his blotter. Inside was a bottle of ink, a square of chamois, and a round tin of beeswax. He lined the items on the cloth, loosening the ink bottle’s lid before retrieving his pen from its holder. With an unhurried economy of movement, he unscrewed the barrel of the pen and set the nib aside.

“Which Detective Constable would you be referring to, Miss Brown?” Moody asked.

“I was referring to a Detective Constable Moody.”

Percy held the pen upright with a stable hand. He squeezed and released the ink dropper to fill the pipette, then drew it from the bottle and held the tip over the barrel’s open chamber.

A thread of blue-black ink streamed into the body of the pen.

Moody scrawled his signature across the bottom of his form, then tossed it onto a jumbled stack on his desk.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“A Mr. Flint,” said Lavender.

A bead of ink dripped onto the side of Percy’s thumb and spattered the cloth below.

“Send him in,” said Moody.

Lavender stepped aside, and a segment of double-brick wall masquerading as a man eclipsed the door frame.

Marcus Flint was preceded by his celebrity in the boxing ring.

Percy observed him from the margins as he crossed the threshold of the office, then stopped, clutching his tweed Ivy cap.

Snatching the cigarette from his mouth, Moody blew a plume of smoke into the blades of the fan. He pointed toward the pair of hard-backed chairs crowded between a rank of filing cabinets in one corner and a coat rack in the other.

“Please, Mr. Flint,” he said. “Do sit down.”

A man Flint’s size might have been a shambler, scraping across the room in glacial fits and starts. But his mass was fluid and tensile, composed of taut ligaments and unpadded muscle. His movements were honed, his jaw square and his thick fingers flexing as he approached.

Percy screwed the lid back on the bottle of ink, threaded the cap onto his pen, wiped it down, and replaced it in his pen holder. He examined his thumb, then pulled a folded handkerchief from the pocket of his waistcoat and took several passes at the ink wicking along the ultrafine lines of his skin.

Flint eased himself into a chair, dwarfed almost to comedy beneath him, and the wood sighed as he leaned back. Eyelids at the three-quarter mark, he regarded Percy and Moody with a stare that communicated a patience both watchful and saturated with menace.

He rested his cap on his thighs, and laid his palms over his knees.

Percy expected the bandages swaddling Flint’s hands at the line of his knuckles. The brutal condition of his fingers—puffed with edema, his knuckles swollen into distinct, yellow-edged spheres—he did not.

In the deep layers of his skin, dusky and nauseous purples seeped out beneath the bandages’ borders, and dry red fissures gaped at the knuckles of his ring and middle fingers.

Behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, Percy watched his own hands at work—his fingers narrow and pale, bruised by the civil violence of a wayward drop of ink.

He rolled the stained drop cloth around the ink, the chamois and the wax, then slid his drawer open and lay the kit in its customary place in the corner.

“Thank you for coming in, Mr. Flint,” said Moody.

He flicked his thumb at the cigarette end, knocking ash into the overflowing ceramic tray near his elbow, then picked up a completed form and held it out toward Percy.

A cursory glance indicated that it required Percy’s signature. He looped his name across the bottom, then placed it on the appropriate stack.

Flint followed Percy’s movements with absent attention, fixing on the paperweight as Percy lifted it and then replaced it on the pile.

It was a Baccarat dome the size and shape of a halved apple, clear glass with a purple and amber millefiori pansy embedded inside.

“It wasn’t my choice to come in, was it?” Flint said. “You’d’ve had me arrested.”

Percy knew Flint's background.

He might have had the bloodied and bandaged knuckles of an East End rowdy, but his three-piece suit was Savile Row.

The only concession his timbre made to his reputation for roughness was a chafed quality, though Percy hadn’t determined whether or not he was a smoking man.

Regular cigars, he thought. But not cigarettes.

Flint’s thoroughbred Oxford drawl shouldn't have surprised him.

But it did.

Percy shifted in his chair, unaccustomed to being caught off guard.

“Arrested? No,” said Moody. He sounded taken aback, as though he’d been called on to correct a typically obedient child. “No, no. This is a voluntary conversation, Mr. Flint! A social call, if you will.”

Flint scoffed. He reached forward and wrapped one of his titanic, broken hands around Percy’s paperweight.

Percy stilled, watching Flint turn the weight over to examine the bottom and sides. He began to roll it between his hands, like a child considering whether or not to pocket a promising rock.

Moody drew at his cigarette, following the glass as it tumbled in Flint's grip.

A flake of ash blew into Moody's eye. He blinked.

“I only wanted to have the title holder over for a friendly chat,” he said.  
Flint balled the paperweight in his fist, then folded his arms over his chest.

“What do you want to chat about?”

Moody stubbed out his cigarette, then drew a silver case from the pocket of the jacket hanging from his chair. He snapped it open and held it toward Flint.

“Smoke?”

“I don’t.”

“No?” asked Moody. “Not good for your endurance? Or your girl not a fan?”

An electrical charge grounded itself at the crown of Percy’s head, fizzing across his scalp and down the midline of his neck. He rubbed his fingertips across his nape, then pushed his spectacles back on the bridge of his nose.

Marcus responded by adjusting his posture, the joints of the chair mewling under his weight.

“Suit yourself,” said Moody.

He tugged a fresh Woodbine from the case and settled it between his lips. Shifting aside a cup with one swallow of syrupy tea festering in the bottom, he uncovered a monogrammed silver lighter.

“You’ve had an impressive run this year, Mr. Flint.” Moody flicked back the lid, grated the flint, and sucked at the flame. He tossed the lighter onto his desk, then blew a line of smoke from the side of his mouth. “In the ring. And out of it.”

Marcus flexed his fingers around the glass dome like it was a cricket ball.

“Terribly unfortunate about the fight last night,” Moody went on. His cigarette was freshly lit, but he held it over the ashtray all the same, and with a gentle, almost caressing touch, tapped its side.

Marcus’ nostrils flared.

“I’ve heard Mr. Lewis’s prognosis has improved,” said Moody. “He’s expected to recover. Eventually.”

Marcus’ stillness demonstrated a formidable, almost geological, endurance.

“Something between you and Davy Lewis?” Moody flourished his hand in a short arc. “Business, maybe? He owe you some money?”

“No,” said Marcus.

For a palpably careful man, the speed and force of his answer was noteworthy.

“No? Hm.” Moody scratched beneath his eye patch, bringing the smoldering end of the cigarette distressingly close to his face. “Personal, then?”

Marcus said nothing.

“Seems unusual, is all. Hit a man so hard in the ring he loses an eye.” Moody gestured at his eye patch. He paused in thought, rubbing at a stain on the rim of his tea cup, then nodded, as if he’d finally settled on what to eat for lunch. “Gains a skull fracture.”

Marcus’s chest moved with the slow, easy breath of a man untroubled by sin, his eyes no more expressive than the sealed seam of his mouth.

Palm facing up, he shifted the glass hemisphere to the tips of his fingers like a gem working its way loose from the prongs of a ring.

“Well. Enough of that. Big celebration tonight!” barked Moody. “I understand congratulations are in order.”

Flint tossed the paperweight, spiraling it up and catching it with an overhand grab.

“You know...hold on a mo.” Moody held up a finger, fishing a section of newspaper from beneath a nebulous pile that Percy understood was mostly trash. “Let’s see…” He turned the page over once, and then again, casting his eye dramatically over the print. “Here we are.” He snapped his finger against the page. “Big engagement to-do written up in the women's pages, very nice. I imagine the Viscount is footing the bill.”

Flint leaned forward in his chair.

“Are we done here?” he asked.

“I haven’t even offered you a cup of tea.” Moody picked up his cup and swirled it.

A commotion erupted in the open secretarial office on the other side of the door.

For a moment, the voices blended, male and female, then Lavender’s broke through.

“If you’ll only wait a minute, Mr—”

Percy and Moody’s door crashed open.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Pryce!” shouted Moody.

Averill Pryce, the solicitor, flax-colored hair parted in the middle and slicked down to a reflective shine, stood with his hat crushed in his hand at the doorknob. He looked fresh pink and indignant in a double-breasted dark blue suit.

“You”—Pryce angled the brim of his hat at Moody—”are done here.” He turned to Marcus. “The next time this lot want a moment of your time, you call me, or you call your father, or you call Mr. Riddle himself immediately.” He let go of the door and jammed his hat back on his head. “Never again,” he said, aiming a finger at Moody. “Are we understood?”

Moody leaned back in his chair and propped his scuffed brogues on the edge of his desk. “It’s just a few words between friends, Mr. Pryce! Mr. Flint and I have a shared interest in society gossip.”

“Come on,” Pryce said to Flint. “Don't forget your hat.”

Flint shrugged his jacket higher up his expansive shoulders as he stood.

“You’ll excuse me, Mr. Flint,” said Percy.

Flint looked down.

His pupils struggled to dial Percy into focus, like he’d just been spoken to by a coat rack and wasn’t sure it was happening.

Percy considered standing.

Flint outweighed him by three stone of muscle, but Percy had at least two centimetres on him in height.

He remained seated, and looked pointedly at Flint’s fist, still closed around the paperweight.

“That belongs to me."

Flint opened his hand and looked at the half globe sitting in his palm. It was clear that he’d forgotten he was holding it. He tossed it once, then stretched out his long arm and centered it on Percy's paperwork.

“My sincerest apologies, Detective Constable,” he said. He contemplated the paperweight. “It’s lovely.”

“Yes, it is,” said Percy.

Pryce checked his pocket watch. Without so much as a nod, Flint walked past him out the door.

“Good day, Mr. Flint! Mr. Pryce!” Moody shouted at their backs. Pryce slammed the door behind himself, rattling the glass in its frame and causing Percy’s diploma to sag on its hook.

Percy cupped his hand over the glass pansy and shifted it toward himself by a millimetre. A protesting spike of pain at the hinge of his jaw indicated that he’d been clenching his teeth. 

“Now that is a sportsman,” said Moody, pointing his cigarette at the door. “But you do wonder what makes a man that hungry to win a fight.”

Percy removed his spectacles, wiped his wrist across his brow, and replaced them.

“I can’t imagine.”

Moody laughed from the back of his throat, coarse and scuffed with smoke. “No, I shouldn’t think a fellow with hair as tidy as yours could.”

* * *

At five minutes to five o’clock, Moody left for the pub, draping his Mack over his arm and settling his dented hat on his head.

“Go home to your mother, Detective Constable Weasley,” he called over his shoulder. “That corpse isn’t going to be any less dead for you having stared at it another hour.” 

Percy made no movement to pack up the case file spread open on his desk.

“Good evening, Detective Constable Moody.”

He stared at the photographs for another hour and fifteen minutes, hovering his pen over a note with a tidy rank of words clipped to the file’s back cover:

Confectionary

Sufferance wharf

Thursday night, Friday morning

The Stag and Hound

Tom Riddle

Viscount Amsworth

At a quarter past six, he closed the file and slipped it back into the filing cabinet.

Outside the station, he shrugged his shoulders to his ears and angled his hat against a penetrating rain.

He skirted the shallow puddles collecting on the pavement, but became aware of a cold sensation at the instep of his left foot. After two blocks, a tactile squelch confirmed his suspicion, mounting since the previous day, that a gap had opened in the seam of his shoe.

He made a mental note to stop by the cobbler in the morning.

Jostled on his feet in the low light of the Underground carriage from Mile End, Percy clutched the handrail. At Charing Cross, he disembarked and changed to the Bakerloo Line.

Thirty minutes later, coat heavy with damp, he walked from Kensal Green Station down long rows of two-storey terraced houses.

He passed through the squealing front gate of a squat- through terrace. It distinguished itself from its neighbors by a coat of coppery red paint and a black iron knocker shaped like a lion with a ring dangling from its mouth.

Percy opened the outer door without knocking, and breathed in the smell of Friday night salmon and potatoes.

Coats, Macks, hats and shawls overwhelmed the pegs in the vestibule. Percy was obliged to hang his overcoat and hat against a knitted cardigan with cuffs darned in mismatched yellow yarn, and a nurse’s blue wool cape.

Still wearing his suit jacket, he entered the inner door.

In the far corner, his sister Ginny trod down the stairs, clearing the bottom two steps in a jump. She hung from the newel post finial with an outstretched arm, pivoting toward the kitchen.

“Perce, tell Ron about that German novel you were telling me about.”

“Pardon?” Percy clicked the door shut, then removed his spectacles and began drying the rain from them with a handkerchief.

“No! Refrain from telling me about any and all novels.” Ron, four years younger and a hair's breadth taller than Percy, stood from the sofa and stubbed out his cigarette. “No offense, Perce.”

“None taken,” Percy said.

Percy’s father sat in his chair beside the fender, a newspaper open on his lap. Ron leaned over and kissed the crown of his head before striding to the door, pausing with his hand on the doorknob.

“Fancy a pint later?” he asked Percy. “Glass of milk, more like?”

Percy drank neither alcohol nor milk, outside of tea.

“I’ll be going home from here,” said Percy, “but thank you.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Where’s Mum?” Percy asked.

Molly’s voice sounded from the kitchen.

“Where else would I be?”

“See you, Perce.” Ron stepped out the door and pulled it closed.

“He’s been out every night for the past two weeks,” said Ginny as she disappeared into the kitchen. “He’s got a girl, obviously. Tea?”

“Yes,” Percy answered. “Thank you very much.”

Percy approached his father and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Hello, Dad. What’s the technology report?”

Arthur covered Percy’s hand with his own.

“Hello, Son,” he said, rustling the newspaper in his lap. “It’ll wait, go and have your tea. Your mum’s kept it hot for you.”

The long dining table in the corner was cleared of everything but the cloth and a single place setting. Percy took his seat before it, and spread the serviette across his lap.

“Hello, love.” Molly emerged from the kitchen, a towel between her hand and a heated plate piled with a salmon filet, potatoes and peas.

“Eat up,” she said, setting the plate in front of him. “You’ve lost more weight. Cuppa?”

“Ginny’s already offered,” he said. “Thank you, Mum. This looks lovely.”

“You can thank me for the potatoes,” Ginny shouted from the kitchen. “They’re better than Mum’s.”

“Watch it, you,” said Molly, snapping the towel against Ginny’s hip as they passed one another in the kitchen doorway. “Dishes done?”

“Ron and George finished them all up except for Percy’s.” She placed a blue cup with a chipped handle next to Percy’s plate. “Here you are. I’ve dropped in an extra sugar to spite you. And with that”—she gave Percy’s shoulder a pat that bordered on a slap—”I’m off to work!”

Ginny stopped by her father’s chair. She kissed his cheek, then brushed her hands against her white nurse’s apron on her way to the front door.

“I was hoping that we’d see you earlier,” Molly said when she reemerged from the kitchen.

“I was detained at work.”

“Hm.”

Percy marveled at the substance his mother could compress into a single interjection.

She sat beside him, propped her chin in her palm, and watched him while he ate.

He made his way clockwise around his plate, handling his fork with the same care and attention he gave his fountain pen. After a moment, he laid his fork down, and glanced sidelong at his mother.

She’d been smiling at him.

Flexing his foot in his damp left shoe, he picked up his tea cup and waited for the inevitable.

She leaned back and dropped her eyes in a feint of nonchalance.

“A little bird told me that Penelope Clearwater is back from Scotland.”

Percy winced around his first mouthful of tea.

Ginny had added at least four sugars.

“Unmarried, still, as I understand it,” said Molly.

“Mother.”

“She’s a lovely girl. Nice family.”

Penelope Clearwater was a lovely girl with a nice and, critically, Catholic family.

“Father MacFadden is going round theirs for tea next Saturday, and I told her mother you’d stop by,” she said.

His cup met its saucer with a deliberate clink. “I am not going to the Clearwaters’ for tea with Father MacFadden next Saturday.”

“Hm,” said Molly, brushing her fingertips over the cream-colored lace of the tablecloth. “Fleur is expecting again.”

“That’s wonderful. I’ll call to congratulate them.”

Molly folded as much intent as was possible into a sigh and then stood and made her way back to the kitchen.

Percy took a bite of his potatoes and waited.

“She’s got that degree now,” Molly shouted. “In chemistry, I believe.”

“Christ Almighty, is she banging on about the youngest Clearwater girl again?” asked George, adjusting his tie as he clomped down the stairs. He swung round the newel cap, its varnish worn away and the bare wood lustrous and dark.

“George!”

“Sorry, Mum!”

George clouted Percy on his shoulder as he passed, jolting his fork. “Quite happily unmarried, as I understand it,” he muttered. “You coming for a pint, Perce?”

“No, I’m heading home.”

George left, and alone with his parents, Percy finished his meal in relative peace.

After he’d done the washing up, he stayed behind to talk about what had caught Arthur’s interest in the paper, and listen to the BBC evening news broadcast. Then he took his leave, kissing Molly’s cheek and offering his father a handshake, which Arthur converted into an embrace by pulling him forward by the hand.

“Will I see you on Sunday?” Molly leaned her hip against the door jamb, her hair frizzed after a day standing over steam. Her question was a skillfully framed command. “And if you owe Father McFadden a visit—”

“I went to confession two weeks ago, Mum,” said Percy. He pushed his arms into his damp coat and perched his hat on his head. “And you will see me on Sunday.”

“Stop by the Clearwaters’.”

“I am not going to stop by the Clearwaters’,” he said, and he walked out the door.

* * *

On the Tube from Kensal Green to Charing Cross station, Percy kept one hand on the rail and the other in his pocket, guarded against the rising chill of fall.

He boarded a carriage at Charing Cross with freshly-painted green handrails and sat down facing the front of the train.

From Charing Cross to Temple, then from Blackfriars to Mansion House, it passed between the green glow and subterranean dark of the tunnels and the reflective brightness of the station platforms.

In his mind, he opened a file drawer and selected a case file, and at his leisure, perused the facts inside.

He considered the Isle of Dogs, masted ships looming in silhouette over the laundry lines networked between crowded terraces.

In a cobbled corridor between a wharf and its warehouse, a man without a name folded into terminal angles below a gantry walkway.

An anxious girl with a bandaged right hand packing boxes on a confectionery floor.

At the sufferance wharf, buried in the seam of a duty log, the cut edges where pages had been removed.

The train slowed and sped and slowed again, from Cannon Street to Monument, then from Mark Lane to Aldgate East.

Percy recalled Tom Riddle, sitting in his club wearing a sharp grey suit. He’d ignored Percy, regarded the lit end of a cigarette, and offered Moody nothing more practicable than a drink that he declined.

Between St. Mary’s and Whitechapel, the rail line broke into the open night of the overground.

He thought about the ornate, old-fashioned letterhead of a Mr. Dean, solicitor for Lord Aubrey Parkinson, Viscount Amsworth.

He shut the file, and put it back in its drawer.

At Stepney Green, Percy allowed himself to close his eyes.

An image appeared, pointless and unwanted, of a man in a Savile Row tuxedo holding a champagne glass in a bruised and bloodied hand.

He cleared his mind completely, and between Stepney Green and Mile End, knew nothing but the muffled, sedative sound of rolling wheels and the carriage swaying on its track.

At Mile End, he disembarked and studiously ignored his cold left foot on the short walk home.

His watch was out for repair, but it was well past ten o’clock, and the light in the right-hand first-floor window of Mrs. Trelawney’s house suggested that she’d been drinking.

Percy turned his key in the front door, and it swung open into an empty hall.

He moved quietly as a rule, but climbed the stairs to his rooms with a heightened degree of care, disinterested in the possibility of another tenant opening a door and attempting conversation.

Two of the three rooms on the first landing were dark, but incandescent light and a radio’s mutter seeped through the gap beneath Trelawney’s door. A snort carried through, and then a brief, pitched laugh. 

Trelawney served good meals and kept a safe, orderly house. The heat was even in her establishment, and the light was plentiful, leaving few corners capable of collecting shadows. But Percy knew them all, and as he followed the rise of the stairs to the top floor, he scanned every one.

The second to penultimate step creaked, and he skipped it, cresting the landing with his room key clutched inside his pocket.

He stopped there, his back foot midway through its rise.

The fissure between the bottom of his door and the carpeting in the hall was as dark as it ought to have been.

But on the other side, thin and crackling, he heard the unmistakable sound of a record playing on his gramophone.

_Come on and hear…_

_Come on and hear…_

Moody's voice from a year earlier rushed alongside his pulse in his ears.

"And you feel these conclusions of yours are beginning to be unavoidable?" Moody had asked, waving his cigarette hand at the orderly ranks of photographs and papers spread across Percy's desk.

Percy did.

For half an hour, he'd sketched tentative lines between imports and exports, ballot boxes and the House of Lords, weapons and sex and murder.

Moody had listened, the heels of his dusty brogues propped on a form, then stared at the blurring fan blades.

After long minutes, he appeared to come to a decision.

"Well." He creaked forward in his chair and reached for his whiskey drawer. "We start knocking on the doors of men like that, we might not like what answers."

On the dark landing, Percy dropped his key into the recesses of his pocket. Drawing his spine upward, he tucked his hand inside the front of his suit jacket, and in half a dozen steps crossed to his door.

Without a sound, he wrapped his hand around the brass doorknob, counted four breaths, then turned it in a crawling half-circle.

It was unlocked.

Every thought fell away.

He slid the obsolete revolver issued to him by the Crown from its holster. Heated next to his body, it was warm in Percy's palm.

He opened the door and pivoted around its edge, then clapped it closed. Keeping his back to the wall, he side-stepped to the left-hand corner of the room, and scanned the dark, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

His rooms were at the top of the house below the eaves, divided between a matchbox sitting room and an even smaller bedroom beyond.

A pair of plain bronze velvet chairs faced the hearth; both sat mercifully empty. 

Mrs. Trelawney provided breakfast and supper as part of her letting fees, but Percy had hauled a cabinet up the stairs and fit it into the corner so that he could keep a spirit stove and a kettle. He’d fixed a set of shelves above it for tea, sugar, glasses and teacups, and the bottles of gin and whiskey his brothers brought over and left behind.

Outside the window, a street lamp shed an unsteady citrine glow that filtered through the net curtain, washing the room in a diluted, sallow twilight.

Percy’s gramophone churned on its table by the hearth.

_Come on and hear…_

_Come on and hear..._

In the narrow window, a figure reclined in silhouette.

It was a woman, sitting sideways, staring out at the street with her bare feet tucked into the corner of the frame. She held a glass on the peak of her folded knees, the finger of liquor inside gold as honey in the backlight.

Percy lowered his gun, and fumbled for the chain of his floor lamp.

At the flare of illumination and the chain’s clinking rebound, she turned her face toward him, and brought his cup to her lips.

She’d changed her hair since he last saw her. It was still black, and cropped just below her ears, but she'd had it curled into soft, loose waves.

She watched him, her face relaxed and expressionless as though she was bored, and then she stood.

Her champagne-colored silk satin gown was untrimmed, with a floor-grazing hem, long sleeves and a high neck. Percy, an unpoetic man, would have called it plain, although he’d been led to understand that plain did not mean cheap. It was clear that every decadence had been poured into its materials and construction, cut, stitched and adjusted to fit her body, and hers alone.

She walked the half-dozen steps to the hearth, her posture easy, then faced the mirror over the fireplace mantel and swiped a fingertip at the corner of her red bottom lip.

The dress hung by some unholy tailoring trick from the ledges of her shoulders, skimming along her sides and over her backside, exposing the whole expanse of her pale and flawless back.

Percy replaced his gun in its holster.

“Miss Parkinson.”

She looked at him sidelong.

“Who let you in?” he asked.

She set her glass on the mantel, then opened the silver cigarette box Percy kept out of politeness for visitors, and plucked one out. A lighter sat next to the box, and she tapped at its ignition button.

“You’ve taken up again?” he asked.

She twisted a segment of a smile in his direction.

“I’m thinking about it,” she said.

Percy took deliberate breaths, cooling the adrenaline flare still burning through the timbers of his body.

“How did you get in?” he asked again.

She tilted the cigarette in her fingertips, looking at Percy as though he was a set of sums, then replaced it in its box on the mantel.

“Mrs. Trelawney is fond of a thirty-year Sherry oak Scotch.”

Percy breathed out his annoyance. He’d have to go downstairs in the morning, sit to tea and explain, carefully, why this could never happen again.

“Why are you here, Miss Parkison?” he asked. “It was my understanding that you had an engagement this evening.”

The twin thin lines of her brows rose.

“It was in the papers,” he explained. “But you’re aware of that.”

“Maybe I had better places to be.” She leaned her elbow on the mantel, cocked her head to the side and rested her chin on the heel of her hand, which gave her the look of a petulant schoolgirl wearing her mother's rouge and mascara.

“Better than your own engagement party?” he asked.

She said nothing.

Dipping low into his well of self-discipline, Percy refused to let his eyes follow the lines of her body.

“ _Here_ isn’t an improvement, surely,” he said.

She shrugged and turned back toward the mirror.

Percy shifted from the corner. He removed his hat, and then his coat, with half an eye still on her, and hung both on the coat rack by the door. On a typical evening, he would have removed his suit jacket, but tonight he left it on.

“I saw your fiancé this afternoon,” Percy said.

He made his way to his tea cabinet, and poured himself a glass of water. It disappeared in three swallows, and he filled it again, sipping the second glass with greater restraint.

She took an interest in her red-lacquered fingernails. “Did you?”

“I did.”

Percy leaned against the wall between his open bedroom door and the cabinet and slid his free hand into his pocket.

“He almost killed Davy Lewis,” he said. “Do you know anything about that?”

He watched her study her face in the mirror again, until her reflected eyes caught his.

“Men fight.”

“Not often like that.” He focused on the cool water washing over his tongue. “But it’s nothing to do with you, I imagine.”

She considered him, then sat in one of his chairs and leaned back, legs crossed and one wrist draped over the arm.

Percy stared at her a moment too long, pointlessly waiting for an answer, then looked away and watched the streaming grey night beyond the curtain.

The gramophone reached the end of the record.

She stood and fetched her drink from the mantel, sidled up to the gramophone and lifted the needle. Carefully, she sleeved the record, and crouched to file it below the player.

She selected another record, and set the needle to hiss in its groove.

_Stars shining bright above you..._

Standing in the corner, she drained half her drink, then clutched the nearly empty glass to her sternum.

“I didn’t get to dance tonight,” she said. “Not even once.”

“Then you should go back to your party.”

Her eyes narrowed minutely.

“I’ll go downstairs and call you a cab,” he said.

She blinked.

“You’re not going to call me a cab.”

“I’m not?” he asked.

She didn’t dignify him with an answer.

Percy pulled off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes.

“Maybe I’ll take the Tube,” she said, without a hint of commitment.

“You will not walk through Mile End at almost midnight in that dress to take the Tube.”

“Won’t I?”

Percy replaced his glasses.

She came toward him on bare feet, wearing a mask of innocence and dragging her hem on the floor.

He wondered where she'd left her shoes.

Percy knew he should move to keep some distance between them, but instead, he traced the perfect arches of her dark brows, the heavy fringe of lashes around her green-gold eyes, and the hard border of her soft mouth.

She stopped at the corner of the cabinet, so close he could have lifted a hand and, without any reach or strain, settled it on her hip.

Percy kept his hands to himself, watching the muscles of her throat undulate as she swallowed the last of her bourbon.

There was a bottle of the same stuff on the highest shelf, one of Bill's contributions. Cradling the empty glass against her chest, she glanced up.

“I can’t reach.”

She damn well could reach.

He stood firm on his feet, but she outwaited him, shielding herself behind a pretty contrivance of naiveté while he exhausted his resolve.

He stepped close, his body separated from hers by a hand’s-breadth, caging her against the cabinet. Reaching an arm over her head, he pulled down the bottle.

Her lips curved—not quite pursed, not quite pouting, and subtler than both—while she held up her glass.

The cork creaked in the neck of the bottle. He poured her two fingers, then reached over her again to set the bottle back on the shelf.

He’d avoided looking until that moment, but when she changed the glass from her right hand to her left, her engagement ring caught the lamplight.

Flint had bought her a massive square-cut diamond and had it set in a platinum band, elaborated around its edges with filigree and flanked by a pair of marquise-cut diamonds at its shoulders.

It looked cold and stark on her finger.

He started—visibly, he realized—when he caught a glimpse of gold beneath her cuff.

First his sense and then his will abandoned him. He tucked his finger below the edge of her sleeve and drew out a bracelet.

It was a thin gold chain of elongated rectangular links. At its center, a porcelain enamel disc lay flush with her skin, bezel set in gold and handpainted with a single purple and gold pansy. The disc shared one of its connecting links with a small gold charm, in the shape of the letter P.

Delicate for no reason more noble than the cruel calculus of affordability, the bracelet circled her wrist below the matchless diamond on her finger.

The sight of them sharing space on her body flooded him with despair.

“Why are you wearing this?” he asked.

Her green and bronze eyes were open wide, damp and reflective.

“Because it’s mine.”

“Take it off,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

She looked at him without moving.

“Take it off,” he said again.

She shook her head.

Percy rotated the bracelet on her wrist, looking for the clasp.

She pulled her hand away and glared at him, then slid out from between him and the cabinet.

Leveling a hard look of reproach over her shoulder, she walked through the open door to Percy’s bedroom.

There was a skirmish inside him.

It was violent and costly, and then it was over.

He followed her.

Enough rain-rinsed yellow light passed through the square window to define a wardrobe, a nightstand, and an iron bed frame, cramped into a corner below the angled ceiling.

Facing his bed, she set her empty glass on his nightstand, then pulled her engagement ring from her finger.

It clinked at the bottom of the glass like an ordinary rock, but it caught every scrap of limited light and lay glittering in a film of bourbon.

She turned her head to look at him, angled her hand under the left shoulder of her dress and pushed the fabric down.

She repeated the gesture on the other side.

Finally, she slid the dress down her hips, and stood in a pool of silk satin, wearing nothing but a cheap gold bracelet.

Her skin was luminous in the low light.

Percy followed the subtle knots of her vertebrae, curving together like a string of beads as she crawled onto the surface of his bed.

She lay down on her belly, tucked her hands beneath her shoulders and looked across the room at him.

He’d made her leave, once.

A year ago, defeated by their impracticability and the secrecy it required, and terrified by the tightening circles his investigations made around the people close to her, he'd told her what seemed like a necessary lie.

_I feel this has run its course._

He'd made himself hard and cool when he said it, sealed off so impenetrably that she'd exhausted herself trying to break through. She’d gathered every object save a stray hair pin he found when he changed his bedclothes. Then she left, with a look that communicated how intensely she hated the lie, him for having told it, and how thoroughly it was disbelieved.

He’d found it within himself to do it once.

They both knew he wouldn't find it again.

Streaks of rain cast shifting shadows over the canvas of her skin.

He took off his suit coat, folded it over the iron footboard, and sat at the edge of the bed.

Returning from exile, he relearned the geography he'd once been native to: the seam in the skin behind her left ear; the way her hair grew in twin whorls to either side of her nape; the thin white scar hidden in the hairline at her left temple, where she'd struck her head against the nursery fireplace as a child; the tiny prominence at the top of her shoulder, a joint that had sometimes occupied the entirety of his focus while he fucked her.

He lay his palm against the faint field of hair between her shoulder blades and hovered it down the center of her back.

"You've lost weight," he said, dipping his fingertips through the valleys between her ribs.

She didn't say anything.

His hand flowed through the hollow of her lower back, slowed over the curve of her backside, and smoothed down the length of her parted thighs.

He stroked behind her knees with the side of his hand, and then moved up again, conforming to the curve of her inner thigh, down toward the mattress and then up.

He ran his palm over the swell of flesh at her thigh’s apex, and then slid his fingers tentatively between her legs.

Her eyes fell closed.

Percy removed his spectacles, folded their arms, and set them in their customary place below the unlit bedside lamp.

Then he gripped her rib cage and pulled her sideways across his lap, naked and glass-eyed, her knees tucked toward her chest.

He threaded his fingers through the hair at her nape.

Her body had been tensed, and he felt it ease, relaxing into pliability when he kissed her.

For a while, she framed his face with her fickle hands, digging the tips of her fingers into his temples, then his jaw, and then the soft skin behind his ears.

She let him kiss her in his steady, methodical way until her impatience won, like it always did, and her hands trailed to his knotted tie. She worked it loose, then unthreaded it from his shirt collar and threw it to the floor. His holster, revolver and all, received a similar discourtesy, and then his waistcoat and his shirt.

He thought about his discreet laundress, receiving his shirts with red smears at the collars and cuffs and once, humiliatingly, his trousers, with a thick stroke of Pansy’s lipstick at the placket.

If he had tasted other mouths after hers, none of them mattered. They faded out of memory, attached to the wrong voice, the wrong hunger, offering the wrong substance for his appetite.

He gripped the back of her head, and demonstrated how starved he had been.

Laying her back on his bed, he stood to remove his undershirt. Her eyes widened when his hands moved to his belt, and he breathed through the riot breaking out below his sternum.

Divested of his shoes, trousers and socks, he paused with his fingers on the buttons of his boxers. Gratified by the sight of her knees chafing impatiently against one another and the way her chest, mottled pink, lifted and fell, he pushed them down his hips. He joined her again, and made her gasp into his mouth at his hand’s incursion between her legs.

He read her with care, his fingers pulsing in and then forward, taking note of each competing signal of anxiety and arousal.

He considered whether she needed him to fuck her, or comfort her.

He supposed he could do both at once—he’d done it before.

She was beautiful, immaculately so, and he enjoyed converting her into an unhinged disaster. And he was angry with her, though he had no right to be.

He’d lost a year with her, he thought, yanking her body down his bed and spreading her legs. He wanted to fuck her so that she felt his grief at the futility of having let her go, only to find her in his bed again, touched and fucked by a hard-knuckled barbarian who thought he could keep her.

Instead, Percy entered her so reverently that she cried.

He urged her along slowly, marveling at passing intricacies: his thumb sliding against the curved ravine of her tongue; her peaked nipple, taut and glistening with a slick of his saliva; the depressions her white-tipped fingers made in the hard muscle of his chest while she sat astride his hips.

Patiently, he removed himself from her at every critical approach, until she grew ragged and sweet, shivering and pulling his hips forward with her hands, supplicating at his throat in time with the creaking bed springs.

She’d had a system, before, something he'd failed to absorb, involving calendar time and arcane physical signals. Plotting her path out of the purgatory he’d built for her, he cycled between thoughts about the tin of prophylactics in his bedside drawer and the prospect of spending himself on her belly.

“Can I—?” he asked, hearing his own voice straining.

Incapable of speech, she nodded.

He sat back on his heels and lifted her hips, then circled his thumb between her legs. Her head dropped back, and he held her tight against his hips, well versed in her preference to be filled and fucked through her rise and denouement.

There were hundreds of ways he wished to finish inside her, but he lay them both out and did so with his chest pressed tight enough to hers that he could feel her heart.

For what felt like an hour, they made a slow and disorganized dissolution, kissing one another’s spent, swollen mouths until he rolled away from her and lay on his back.

She tucked her body into his side, trapped his leg between hers, and began littering his chest with hot, damp kisses, her lipstick long since vanished. 

“Are you happy with yourself?” he asked.

She looked up, eyes half-lidded and vacant.

“Yes.”

For half an hour, he thought, he could allow it.

“Pansy,” he began some minutes later, brushing a curl back from her eye, “your father—”

Her lips paused against his sternum, halfway through a disorderly kiss, and she shook her head. 

“I don’t want to know.”

He pulled her body onto his, his renewed arousal almost an embarrassment until she shifted her hips in frank enthusiasm to answer it.

* * *

He woke before her, pulled on a T-shirt, cotton pajama trousers and his glasses, and left her alone in his decimated bed to make a cup of tea.

The rain had stopped, and Percy considered the lackluster blue outside his window, leaning a bruised hip against the tea cabinet while the water boiled.

She’d taken everything with her when she’d left the last time, and he blinked at the prospect of smuggling her downstairs in a wrinkled evening gown and her hair and body in the state he’d brought them to.

He turned at the groaning floorboards.

Pansy straggled out of his bedroom wearing his button up shirt, the cuffs rolled back and still dangling past her palms.

She folded herself into his back, arms around his middle, and kissed him between his shoulder blades.

“Good morning,” she muttered, muffled in the fabric of his T-shirt.

“Good morning,” he replied.

The kettle began to sound.

Pansy padded across the room to the gramophone, bent down, and riffled through Percy’s records.

At length, she made her selection, and set it to play.

_Gee, it’s tough to be broke, kid…_

The bracelet still hung from her wrist.

Percy had given it to her at the end of their first year, under advice carefully extracted from his eldest brother's wife.

Pansy had gone away for two days, and come back still wearing it, and in the damp aftermath of a half-dressed fuck, she’d lain in his arms and showed him the charm she’d added.

“This one is me,” she’d said, stroking the bevel around the porcelain pansy.

“And this one is you.” She’d tapped the little gold P, making it swing on its loop. “Say you like it.”

“I like it,” he’d said, pushing her onto her back and sliding his mouth over her silk slip. “Shall I show you how much?”

He watched her sidelong from across the room, ignoring her as she enticed him with a curling finger. Once the kettle had reached its full voice, Percy poured them each a cup.

“Is there something you require from me, Miss Parkinson?” he asked.

“Come here,” she said.

_Who knows, someday I will win too..._

She was spoilt and petty and not entirely above stomping her foot. 

He found it pleasing to deny her, but sometimes he liked offering her swift obedience so that he could take it back tenfold the moment he had her beneath him.

He walked slowly to her and sighed as her arms circled his waist.

“I still haven’t had my dance,” she said, resting her cheek on his chest.

“Shall I take you out?”

It was a favorite conceit of theirs, and one that brought them pain, laying wide the miserable horizon of hope.

_Now though I see what our end is..._

Even without Tom Riddle’s destructive capacity, or the promise of personalized violence at the end of Marcus Flint’s long reach, they were impossible.

He could buy her a thin gold ring, ask her to convert, and make her the mistress of the two-bedroom terrace a detective’s salary would buy.

He’d no sooner do that to her than allow himself to be kept at her standard by her father’s filthy money.

Both of them knew all he could give her was borrowed time in a pair of faded rooms.

They pretended to want nothing more.

“No,” she said. “I don’t like going out. Take me to bed.”

He circled his arm around her waist, and pulled her tight against him.

_I can’t give you anything but love, baby..._

She stood on his feet, and relaxed in his arm, her right hand in his left.

He moved in a three-quarter rhythm—accent on the first beat—at odds with the record on the gramophone.

_That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby._

He spun them from the hearth toward the tea cabinet, then turned them in a swift circle away from the window, smiling at her spontaneous laugh.

On a first, accentuated beat, spiraling through the open door toward his unmade bed, he kissed her.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always greatly appreciated, no matter how long the work has been posted.  
> Come find me on [Tumblr](https://pacific-rimbaud.tumblr.com/) for asks, art, and drabbles.


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